Usability: Denver Post Electronic Edition, or Why online newspapers still suck.

I’ve never expected much from newspaper sites; their design has been years behind the curve, blanketed with ads, and transitioned poorly from their print equivalents. This morning I ventured to the Denver Post web site, and saw they had a free preview of their online edition.

Using Firefox 2.0.0.6, I was presented with the following screen:

Was the entire application broken, or did it have something to do with Firefox? I opened the page in IE7 and was presented with the application as intended; the wonderful folks at Olive Software made a number of mistakes:

• They did not take into account that tech-savvy readers might not be using IE7. Since there was no specific message that only IE7 was supported, it appears they didn’t even do testing on alternate browsers. Bad developers, bad QA.
• They allowed a cryptic error message to be displayed to the user, which provides no further information or guidance to correct the error. They even managed to misspell arcive(sic).
• The page includes a reload-on-resize script for Netscape 4!?! With what kind of antiquated code base are they developing web applications?

It’s disappointing to see poor implementations of technology such as this targeted at a general audience. Shame on you Olive Software; enterprise software should be better than this. As a user, since I had such a poor experience with the free demonstration of the technology, is it any wonder I didn’t choose to pay for the full version?

Further Reading

• Error Message Guidelines, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox for June 24, 2001.
• Local News Sites Suck, a rant on the state of online newspapers in general.
• Online or Not, Newspapers Suck, an old article from Wired that still has relevance.